When it comes to qualifying leads on your website, response time is everything.

According to research from InsideSales.com & HBR, even if you wait just five minutes to respond after a lead first reaches out, there’s a 10x decrease in your odds of actually getting in touch with that lead.

After 10 minutes, you’ll see a 400% decrease in your odds of qualifying that lead.

For John Short, VP of demand gen at the recruiting software company Workable, time to respond was the reason he started looking at Drift.

As he explained:

We wanted to increase the number of people reaching out to request demos, and pricing. We hypothesized that people don’t fill out forms because they don’t think they will get contacted.

Why Lead Response Time Is Crucial

Based on our survey of 433 B2B sales teams, it turns out that John’s hypothesis is absolutely correct.

We found that just 7% of sales teams responded to leads within the first five minutes. Meanwhile, 55% took 5+ days to respond, or never bothered to respond at all.

What Makes Drift Different

A combination of factors led the Workable team to try Drift.

First, John liked the approach and philosophy we’ve developed, which is focused on helping teams move leads through their sales funnels more quickly.

From a product standpoint, John was drawn in by our intelligent chabots, which can qualify leads for your sales team in real-time, 24/7, as well as our intelligent routing features.

So instead of sales reps having to waste time answering support questions and chatting with leads who are outside of their territories, the bot can filter out non-leads (and bad leads) and will route the good leads to reps based on the criteria you set — like Salesforce ownership).

Speaking of Salesforce, that was another key differentiator when it came to choosing Drift.

By connecting Drift with Salesforce, John has been able to understand exactly how many leads he’s been generating from Drift and how much revenue those conversations are bringing in.

How Workable Uses Drift to Grow Sales Pipeline

John uses Drift to target three high-intent pages on the Workable website: their Demo page, their Pricing page, and their Contact Us page.

Essentially, he’s using Drift to set up a second channel for capturing qualifying leads on the site — a real-time channel that’s powered by conversations, not lead capture forms.

And remember how we said that responding in less than five minutes was the sweet spot when it came to qualifying leads?

Well that still isn’t fast enough, according John. As he explained:

We have SDRs (sales development reps) managing Drift and our goal is to respond in under a minute. It’s critical for our users that we respond within seconds. Average time on page for us is about three minutes, so if someone starts a conversation and they have to wait two minutes, then that’s a long time for them.

Early Results

By focusing on improving his sales team’s response time, John has been able to see an increase in qualified leads. And that’s net new qualified leads — people who otherwise would have fallen out of the funnel if Drift hadn’t caught them.

But it’s not just leads that Drift has an effect on, it’s sales pipeline.

As John told us: “Our open pipeline from Drift has grown to be a significant percentage of our overall open pipeline.”

At the end of the day, this is how John sums up what Drift does for sales and marketing teams:

It makes it easier for prospects to talk to people on your team, and the benefit is that you’ll see conversion rates increase both from visit-to-lead and from lead-to-customer.

See why thousands of businesses use Drift to generate leads & close deals faster.